On September 12, 2013 TGI will be part of the webinar The Art of Efficiency, Kate Dunn from InfoTrends will be joining us to facilitate the webinar. Being an expert in Marketing and Sales, we wanted to provide her background in the industry, and to ask her a few questions about web portals and eCommerce.
Kate Dunn is CEO and founder of Digital Innovations Group (DIG) in Richmond, Virginia. Kate started her professional career in market
ing with Xerox Corporation. After 15 years with the company, she joined Choice Communications, Inc. as vice president of marketing and sales. She was instrumental in the development of Choice 1:1, the personalized printing division in 1998. Choice was widely recognized as a leader in relevant marketing with four cases added to the PODi Best Practices in Digital Print in 2003. Kate is a frequent guest lecturer in both the undergraduate and post-graduate programs at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Business on the subjects of integrated marketing and sales.
Online Document libraries or B2B web portals are big right now, why are they gaining popularity?
Kate: Since 2008 enterprises have been looking to reduce their marketing spend and still generate results. Initially this took the form of a reduction in spending. However, organizations are starting to understand that their spend is more than what they pay their partner vendors for things like print or digital services.
Over 50% of the costs of marketing materials come from process costs to customize, warehouse, manage inventory and from obsolescence. And that doesn’t even tackle the opportunity lost from marketing that is not relevant enough to its recipients to drive response and interaction.
Today smart marketers are examining their supply chain for ways to improve their efficiency from customizing documents through to their distribution. They are also looking at ways to streamline the process for creating and producing more relevant documents like personalized or versioned direct mail, digital documents or messaging and signage. One way to do this is through the web by creating document libraries that can be customized, ordered, produced and distributed on-demand. They are ending up with more efficient processes, far less waste in their supply chain and more effective documents that deliver much higher ROI.
B2B eCommerce VS. B2C eCommerce, Can you explain the difference between the two?
Kate: eCommerce typically refers to procuring something over the web. For B2B that means companies selling to other businesses and for B2C that means companies selling to consumers. Either way the company providing the service is going to invest in user interfaces that make it easy for end users, either consumers or employees to customize, order and track what they are buying.
For B2B applications, the web interface is typically branded for the company. Including both their static documents like business cards, letterhead etc. and their customized or personalized sales and marketing materials. B2C sites are branded to the company providing the resource and have templates for postcards, books, calendars etc that can be customized by the consumer.
How are B2C and B2B eCommerce similar?
Kate: They both use the web, and streamline the process for users to customize, proof, order and track the things they want to print.
What are the main goals for companies to turn to B2B eCommerce?
Kate: They typically come at it from two sides – efficiency and effectiveness.
On the efficiency side, they want to reduce the number of steps and the time it takes to create or customize the materials. They need to operate, market or sell their services and eliminate costly handling and obsolesce within their supply chain.
On the effectiveness side they want to make the process easier for creating more relevant and personalized documents, which deliver higher response rates, more customer engagement and higher returns.
It boils down to saving money and making money.
Join us September 12, 2013 for our Webinar, The Art of Efficiency.
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